Saturday, March 22, 2008

evaluating music social networks

Music Social Networks?

Only MySpaceMusic and Last.fm, at this point in my investigations, are worth bothering with.

Music social networks, like many Web 2.0 products, are seriously dysfunctional and a waste of time. I have been testing such sites as MOG, iJigg, Pandora, etc. and they all fail miserably. My goal is to find sites where artists can create profiles, upload free dl mp3s and videos, and assemble an online community of fans and peers (other musicians).

Fans seek socnets that cater to their musical tastes, enabling them to discover new songs and bands, and interact with the musicians they like. Artists seek to display and distribute their mp3s, m4as, photos, videos, promo trinkets, and news about upcoming shows and recordings.

It pissed me off yesterday when iJigg kept giving me the idiotic, non-informative "oops!" every time I tried to upload mp3s of my own music to it. "Oops!" is not a legitimate, professional error message, it's a lazy crap coder's cop-out.

Last.fm enables you to create separate albums, with CD cover art, and keep adding more tracks to them, if you wish. This means you can make exclusive "online only" digital albums for your fans. Those with obsessive collector mentalities will hunt down every song they can find, and will be delighted to find these "rare" items on the internet.

I'll reserve more commentary on Last.fm for an upcoming Guide to Last.fm Artist Promotions post.

If you're a fan, you may like several music socnets. But artists with Web 2.0 proclivities may want to conserve their time and energy for the cream of the crop, which your pal Vaspers is in the process of determining and revealing.

Music changes everything.

Peace activists need anti-war anthems. Animal rights activists need pro-sentient life jingles. Feminists need anti-patriarchy tunes. Anarchists need pro-freedom music. I'm working on providing such songs to all the groups who are sincerely deconstructing and humiliating the Powers That Pretend To Be, the domination systems propped up by guns and bullshit.

Music is so subversive, many tyrants in history, including Plato's Republic and North Korea, outlaw certain types and content.

Music is the belief system re-orienting artform.

Just remember what the Beatles did to culture, and how the most effective training for children is memorizing songs (like for Stranger Danger programs). Socrates said melodies and lyrics are calming to the mind, like metaphysical lullabyes. Radical militarism kooks sound trumpets and beat on drums to psyche out the enemy and encourage the government-sponsored killers.